13 comments:

Strange, I thought what we have now represented that pretty well. On second thought perhaps it’s a chaotic system with the strange attractor representing to be self interest or perhaps arrogance as for what has been happening in Canada’s parliament seems to indicate to be what they all have in common:-) With that in mind perhaps random is the better way as for me it represents the set of all sets which of course would give us benefit at least of all possible outcomes.

Tripped over this while looking for other stuff but it's an idea I've nursed for quite a few years now. Elections seem easily corrupted by donors and special interests even if the voting is above board, and the longer I live the more it seems that the people I would want to vote for would touch political office with a barge poll. And that in many cases (cf the current US president) that almost anyone could do better.

What I settled on was that if selected on the same basis as jury duty participation in local government should be mandatory from the age of 18, and kids be prepared for it as part of being an adult. Parliament then could be filled with a random selection of people who had already served on their local council.

Can't see it happening any time soon but I like tinkering with it every once and a while. Happy Crimbo!

If the members didn't need to be elected, and didn't care what everybody else thought, what would keep them from devoting their terms of office to looting the country on their own behalfs? This happens a lot even with the threat of retribution hanging over them.

Vague and unreliable memory suggests (and Wikipedia seems to agree) that this wouldn't be such a new idea... except for the replacement of "reasonable people", for some definition of reasonable, with "everyone".

The question is: to be fully representative, one would have to extend the pool of possible applicants to include, for instance, the prison population. This is unlikely to work well in theory or in practice, surely?

Anyway: this comment has been an excuse to carry out part 5 of a meme I got tagged with. Please feel free to ignore, of course :-)

since we are chosing em randomly from the population so results may vary in every session due to difference in calibers of people but overall it is going to like now only becoz even the elected ones are not certified from any institution for taking political decisions in a right way.all of our grt leaders are also from the population but they did it well becoz of their commitment.thus nothing will change.

As noted above, the proposed system - called sortition, (or allotment) - was the one used by the Democratic archetype, Athens. In fact, the classical political philosophers (most prominently, Aristotle, but this was apparently a truism at the time) considered selection by lot to be democratic, and selection by election to be oligarchical.

Power would end up in the hands of the civil service. With most legislators neither especially interested in the job or especially prepared for it, it would be too easy for the administrators to present matters to parliament so as to get the outcome they wanted.